Tsukuru is an intelligent, respected in his career and comfortably well off but there is a huge gap in his life. Like so much of Japanese fiction this novel contains themes of alienation and loneliness, embedded into an atmosphere of loss and longing. But Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage attracted me because it sounded more in the style of Norwegian Wood which I loved.
I’ve avoided him largely because his novels are frequently surrealistic and contain large doses of magical realism. This is only the second novel I’ve read by Haruki Murakami. And so he goes on a pilgrimage to track down those friends and discover the truth. She won’t commit to a relationship with Tsukuru unless he can move past that issue. Now sixteen years later his new girlfriend, Sara Kimoto, encourages him to come face-to-face with the past, to seek out his former friends to mend the relationships and discover why they rejected him. The ostracism left him feeling suicidal, then guilty “as an empty person, lacking in colour and identity.” Quest For Truth Until one day during Tsukuru’s second year in college when those friends abruptly cut all relationships with him. They did everything together, wanting no other friends to disturb their harmony. In his high school years, he had been part of a close-knit quintet an “orderly, harmonious community” of two girls, three boys. … a container that for the sake of convenience was labelled with the same name – but its contents had been replaced. He feels as if the real Tsukuru Tazaki passed away years earlier, leaving only a shell: He has no friends and all his relationships with women have come to nothing. After work he retreats either to a train station or to his apartment where he listens to music. He can sit for hours in a station watching the ebb and flow of passengers and the rhythm of train arrivals and departures. Tsukuru Tazaki is a 36-year-old railway engineer with an abiding passion for train stations. The character in question is a young man whose life is haunted by a great loss in his adolescent years.
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